Obituaries Thread 🐐

[balbec]

Mike Lynch obituary: Tech entrepreneur and adviser to David Cameron

Known as ‘the British Bill Gates’, he was involved in a 12-year legal fight with Hewlett-Packard

The Times

Thursday August 22 2024, 4.53pm BST, The Times

Law

Technology

United States

Lynch sold Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. His share of the proceeds was estimated at $800 million

DEAN BELCHER FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

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In May last year Mike Lynch was extradited from Britain to America, where he spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco. It was the culmination of a 12-year transatlantic legal fight for the man known as the “British Bill Gates”, who had been science adviser to David Cameron during his time as prime minister.

The case stemmed from the $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) sale in August 2011 of Autonomy, the business software company Lynch co-founded, to the American tech giant Hewlett-Packard (HP). HP claimed that he had cooked the books, tricking the company into paying $5 billion more than it should have for Autonomy. Lynch maintained his innocence, arguing that the powerful American corporation was suffering from buyer’s remorse.

Lynch had been a research fellow at Cambridge University when he started Autonomy in 1996 with a couple of colleagues. At first it was just a handful of “eccentric people working really hard on a project. No bureaucracy. No admin. Lots of late nights, lots of eating cold pizza.” Approaching his bank manager for funds, he was “told to come back when I was older and had more experience”. Venture capitalists were no better. “There were a lot of City people who didn’t know where the on-switch was on their computers,” he recalled.

• Bayesian yacht latest

Lynch in Cambridge in 2000

BRYN COLTON/GETTY IMAGES

Instead, Lynch claimed to have raised the money in a chance encounter with an eccentric former pop music promoter in a Soho pub. “He’d never met me before, but he lent me £2,000 on the spot,” he recalled. “I bought a second-hand computer and, completely counter to the Silicon Valley model, funded the business out of operations from then on.”

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Another setback came two years later when Autonomy was rejected by the London Stock Exchange because of the company’s “insufficient trading record”. Instead, it was listed on the Easdaq, the European stock exchange in Brussels, before joining the Nasdaq in New York, though here again he encountered resistance. “Software from England?” asked one contact. “That’s where bone china comes from.”

Short, bald and for many years sporting a clipped beard, Lynch was invariably casually dressed and often appeared uncomfortable in social situations. He had a difficult face to read. Explaining what Autonomy did in layman’s terms did not come easily. “People often describe us as a search engine, but only 5 per cent of our revenue comes from that,” he said. The other 95 per cent came from software that can identify and match themes and ideas, sorting mammoth amounts of data to make it easily accessible.

The technology soon moved on from sorting text to sorting voices, which he insisted was not as sinister as it sounds. “Business is done by phoning people and most of those calls these days are recorded. Put all the emails and phone calls together, we can sort the whole lot. It’s going to be a massive market.” Autonomy grew at an exponential rate and was soon being surrounded by opportunists. When HP bid for the company in 2011, Lynch, by then a minority owner, had little choice but to sell. His own share of the proceeds was an estimated $800 million.

HP cried foul in November 2012, announcing an $8.8 billion writedown of assets. The Serious Fraud Office in Britain investigated, but could not find enough evidence to take any action. The US Department of Justice saw things differently and in November 2018 Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice-president of finance whose death in a car accident was announced on Monday August 19, were indicted on 17 charges of conspiracy and wire fraud, later reduced to 15. Their position was not helped by a civil case at the High Court in London in which the judge found in HP’s favour, adding that Lynch was a “blunt and dictatorial” executive who “expected to get his way, and did so”.

The merits of Lynch’s extradition case, and the 2003 treaty on which it was undertaken, were hotly debated both in press and in parliament. Nevertheless, he was flown in chains to San Francisco and on March 18 this year went on trial. After 11 weeks the jury retired to consider its verdict, returning two days later with not guilty verdicts, a remarkable accomplishment in a justice system that acquits in only 0.4 per cent of federal trials.

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Mike Lynch arriving at the High Court for his case against Hewlett-Packard in 2011

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE

“When you hear that answer, you jump universes,” he told The Sunday Times last month. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.” His 24-hour armed guard was dismissed, his ankle tag removed and the surveillance cameras installed in every room of the San Francisco mansion to which he was confined were deactivated. “It’s a very strange situation to now be in a different mindset where you’re back,” he added through tears. “I stood on Piccadilly Circus the other day, which has the most enormous permanent traffic jam, and I’m just thinking, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen’.”

Michael Richard Lynch was born in 1965 and raised in Ilford, Essex. He was the elder of two sons of Irish immigrants, recalling how at that time the IRA were bombing English cities which meant that “you had to learn to run fast”. His parents were Michael, a firefighter from Co Cork “who advised against earning a living running into burning buildings”, and Dolores, a nurse from Co Tipperary who worked in the same hospital where her son had his first job, as a cleaner. “I’m still a demon mopper,” he added. His mother and his younger brother, a builder, died while he was detained in San Francisco. “They never lived to see this resolved,” he said ruefully.

By the age of seven he had developed an eye for patterns, remembering a television programme about Mopsy, the squirrel. Afterwards, his teacher asked: “Now children, what does Mopsy do next?” No one knew. “I thought, how can these people have watched this and not realise what Mopsy did next?” he said.

At Bancroft’s School, Woodford, he sailed through classes, prompted by the enthusiasm of a science teacher “who liked blowing things up”. He went on to read natural sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before finding employment locally at GEC Marconi, “the dullest, most boring” place to work. Soon he returned to Cambridge for a PhD, producing a thesis on probability that delved into the ideas of Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century Presbyterian minister who was obsessed with using statistics to probe the mind of God.

Lynch in 2002

BEN GURR FOR THE TIMES

He started his first company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, in 1991 and quickly won a contract with South Yorkshire police to design a machine that would match fingerprints. Soon, murders from many years earlier were being solved. “We were fortunate in that we met people who were so intent on their core business of catching criminals that they didn’t care that we weren’t IBM,” he told The Sunday Times. Five years later the technology had progressed, and Autonomy was spun out of Neurodynamics.

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• Mike Lynch: Flown to the US in chains, now he is free … and talking

Lynch was an intense and driven boss. He pulled off countless takeovers, gobbling up competitors and growing the business ever larger. He clashed with critics and, as with most serial entrepreneurs, not every idea succeeded. Kenjin, a forerunner of today’s Artificial Intelligence, was billed as the perfect search engine that would not only scour the internet but also users’ own PCs to prepare documents on a given theme. “Search engines like Yahoo! are consigned to the dustbin,” he declared at its launch in 2000.

After the sale of Autonomy, Lynch started Invoke Capital, investing in European technologies. Despite his legal difficulties and the ensuing costs, he still had a place on The Sunday Times Rich List, where this year he was at No 286 with a net worth estimated at £500 million.

Home was a Georgian mansion near Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he kept Red Poll cattle and bred Koi carp. He had two daughters, Esme and Hannah, as well as six dogs — two dachshunds and four sheepdogs — all named after engineering parts: Faucet, Switch, Tappet, Pinion, Valve and Cam.

He enjoyed the theatre, played the clarinet and jazz saxophone, claiming that he could have been a professional musician, and enjoyed reading the works of Isabel Allende and Graham Greene. “I don’t start my day too early, a legacy of the computer world,” he said. “When I’m in Suffolk I have a long hot bath, and there’s no telephone. It’s thinking time.”

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Ideas kept coming, one of which was related to digital television. “Suppose you are watching The X Files and Mulder picks up a beer. You can press on the beer and get one ordered,” he said, brimming with excitement at the thought. “Scully comes in. You don’t like her hair? You can have a chat about it with other viewers … People will love it.”

Lynch, along with one of his daughters, Hannah, was one of several people on board the Bayesian, a 184ft luxury yacht, when it sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning. The yacht’s registered owner is Angela Bacares, his wife and business partner, who is among the survivors.

Mike Lynch OBE, technology entrepreneur, was born on June 16, 1965. His death was announced on August 22, 2024. He was 59

[Raylan]

Brian Wilson obituary: pop genius behind the Beach Boys

https://archive.ph/mwaGG

[Tassotti]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/07/10/alan-pollock-flew-through-tower-bridge-died-obituary/

[flattythehurdler]

He had a face you’d like to punch

[Raylan]

Mike McDonagh obituary: maverick Irish aid worker

https://archive.ph/xypwO

I knew this man to see but had no idea he had lived this life. Passed away out playing golf in Spanish Point last week.

[Raylan]

Robert Duvall at the 2015 Oscars, when he was nominated for The Judge

JEFF VESPA/GETTY IMAGES

The Times

Monday February 16 2026, 6.10pm GMT, The Times

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It took Robert Duvall 12 years and $5 million of his own money to make The Apostle. But the film, which Duvall wrote (in long hand), directed, starred in, co-produced and described as “the most complete thing I have ever done”, confounded the expectations of the studios that turned it down. A gripping drama, The Apostle was dominated by a towering performance from Duvall as a fiery, deeply flawed preacher from Texas who flees a crime scene to seek a new life, a new identity and, ultimately, redemption.

So convincing was his proselytising fervour that there were reports of audiences spontaneously finding God during the film. Duvall recalled: “I had a letter about some basketball players in Iceland who saw the movie and embraced the Lord, right there in the theatre.”

He was a director, a composer and singer, a keen and competent tango dancer, but most of all Duvall was an actor’s actor. He was described by The New York Times as “the American Olivier” and by the critic Leonard Maltin as “one of the most gifted actors to grace the screen”. The Guinness Book of World Records named him “the most versatile actor in the world”. Initially, at least, he was more often cast in supporting roles than in the lead. “Maybe if I had straightened my teeth more, I could have been a leading man more often,” he said.

Duvall was, by inclination, a character actor who preferred authenticity over eyecatching showiness. That is not to say that he did not make every on-screen moment count: in the role of the napalm-sniffing surfer Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, he had only 11 minutes of screen time, but they were the most memorable 11 minutes of the entire film.

Duvall, right, delivered the most famous line in Apocalypse Now: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”

- YouTube

He was known for his forcefully expressed views on the creative process — he apparently threatened the life of a theatre director and was rumoured to have destroyed the director Bruce Beresford’s chair with an axe during the making of Tender Mercies — but he formed lasting and richly productive collaborative relationships with some film-makers, most notably Francis Ford Coppola.

Robert Selden Duvall was born in 1931 in San Diego, California, the son of Mildred, an amateur actress, and William Howard Duvall, a US navy rear-admiral. He described himself as a navy brat, growing up primarily in Annapolis, Maryland, where his father was posted to the United States Naval Academy. Education was not his strong suit, but he attended Severn School, Maryland, and The Principia, Saint Louis, Missouri, before graduating, in 1953, from Principia College, Illinois, with a liberal arts degree.

In an act of rebellion against his father, he served in the army, leaving in 1954 as a private first-class. Duvall had already realised that his future lay in acting and in 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre alongside Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman (obituary, February 27, 2025) and James Caan. Hoffman and Hackman were his room-mates during that time and they shared a friendship that, in the early years at least, was characterised by pranks and bar fights. Skirmishes and quarrels aside, Duvall counted the pair as life-long friends, saying: “A friend is someone who many years ago offered you his last $300 when you broke your pelvis. A friend is Gene Hackman.”

Casual jobs such as mail-sorting and truck-driving kept food on the table, but Duvall’s intense stage presence soon led to regular theatre work. Hoffman recalled that Duvall channelled his natural state of low-level fury into his work, picking a random audience member and training his anger and animosity on that unfortunate individual.

The early Sixties brought television bit-parts, but Duvall’s first notable film role was playing the reclusive oddball Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird, in 1962. He was recommended for the role by the screenwriter Horton Foote, who would become a staunch supporter throughout Duvall’s career. Embracing the method approach, Duvall locked himself out of the sun for six weeks and bleached his hair to match his ashen skin. During the shoot he met his first wife, the former dancer Barbara Benjamin (later Marcus); they were married in 1964 and divorced in 1981.

Barbara Benjamin, the former dancer, with Duvall before the 1973 Oscars

FRANK EDWARDS/FOTOS INTERNATIONAL/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Duvall continued to work in theatre and television bit-parts for much of the 1960s, but by the end of the decade he started to assert himself in supporting roles in more notable films, including Countdown, Robert Altman’s first feature; the Steve McQueen crime thriller, Bullitt, and the John Wayne western, True Grit. There was a clash of personalities on the set of the latter. Duvall was not a fan of Henry Hathaway’s bullish directing style, a fact that he made known. Wayne, meanwhile, took against Duvall, and threatened to punch him if he continued to argue with Hathaway.

A happier experience, the same year, was Rain People, which Duvall joined as a last-minute replacement for Rip Torn. It was the start of a fruitful collaboration with the director Francis Ford Coppola. During the shoot, the young George Lucas visited the set, subsequently casting Duvall as the lead in his feature film debut, THX 1138.

Duvall reconnected with Coppola for The Godfather, in which he displayed a slippery charm and muscular assurance as the mafia lawyer and consigliere Tom Hagen. The role earned him his first Oscar nomination. It was a rambunctious shoot, with Duvall and Caan initiating an outbreak of mooning. The first instance of bared buttocks — Coppola, Marlon Brando and Salvatore Corsitto were on the receiving end — was an effort to break the tension during rehearsals. The mooning soon reached epidemic proportions, with the apex being when Brando and Duvall hijacked the shooting of the wedding scene to moon 400 cast and crew members.

Alongside Marlon Brando, left, in The Godfather (1972)

ALAMY

With the arrival of the 1970s, American cinema entered a particularly rich period. The rise of disruptive, maverick voices in Hollywood was a gift for a versatile, if somewhat prickly character actor such as Duvall. High points included The Godfather II, Network, The Eagle Has Landed and, both in 1979, Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini. He was Oscar-nominated for both, in consecutive years, but did not win until his fourth nomination, for his performance as a broken-down country and western singer in Tender Mercies in 1983. It was the long-time supporter Horton Foote who convinced Duvall to sign up for the role by visiting and reading the screenplay out loud to him. Not only did Duvall win the Oscar, he also wrote and performed the songs for the picture.

The 1980s brought a new marriage, to the actress Gail Youngs, which lasted from 1982 to 1986. She later described him as “a tortured soul driven by his need for perfection”. Yet it was Youngs who brought the television mini-series Lonesome Dove to his attention after she read the novel on which it was based.

Gail Youngs with Duvall on Broadway

RON GALELLA COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Duvall won a Golden Globe for his performance as a former Texas Ranger, but had a combative relationship with the director Simon Wincer. He later observed: “I’ve worked with three Australian directors, and we didn’t always see eye to eye. But, you know, sometimes when you have a little turmoil, it can turn out better than if everything is in total harmony.”

The same could not be said for his marriages. After Youngs, Duvall married his former tango instructor Sharon Brophy. After her alleged affair with their pool boy, he gave her 30 minutes to pack and leave. In return, she described him as cold and aloof. It was the third marriage to dissolve into acrimony. Duvall commented: “My former wives have been pretty vindictive in the end,” adding: “I’m just not good at marriage.”

The fourth time was the charm. Duvall met Luciana Pedraza in 1996 outside a bakery in Buenos Aires (he had just completed filming The Man Who Captured Eichmann). Despite a 41-year age difference, they immediately connected. In 2002, Duvall combined his passions — Argentina, tango and Luciana — in a film project, Assassination Tango, about a hitman who becomes involved in Buenos Aires tango culture. Duvall directed and starred alongside Luciana. A more successful collaboration was their marriage, in 2005, which was forged on a shared love of horses and daily tango sessions in a converted barn in the Virginia farm where Duvall made his home.

With Luciana Pedraza on the Oscars red carpet, 2015

MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At home in 1985

BERNARD GOTFRYD/ALAMY

Duvall was fond of quoting his friend, the actor Wilford Brimley, on the age difference: “The worst thing in the world for an old man is an old woman. But when she says action, you’d better come up with something!” Duvall, it was fair to say, was not a man who would tiptoe around political correctness. On feminists he was scornful: “What a double standard. They witter on about having the vote and then elect a guy like Clinton because he’s good-looking and puts through women-friendly policies.” Politically conservative — he attended George W Bush’s inauguration, endorsed John McCain and hosted a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani — he was vocally critical of Hollywood’s liberals.

Yet Hollywood turned the other cheek, and continued to provide Duvall with meaty roles right up until the end of his career. He was Oscar nominated once again for The Judge, in which he played Robert Downey Jr’s ageing father. And while his mooning days were over, Duvall remained youthful in his approach, crediting the film’s wit and energy to his habit of playing pranks on Downey Jr throughout.

Robert Duvall, actor, was born on January 5, 1931. He died “peacefully at home” on February 15, 2026, aged 95

[myboyblue]

@Raylan

“A friend is someone who many years ago offered you his last $300 when you broke your pelvis. A friend is Gene Hackman.”

Two of a kind those two I’d say.

[feck_it]

a legend. Godfather 1 and 2 were his best. RIP